


Afterlife

by earthmylikeness



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 12:56:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11486841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earthmylikeness/pseuds/earthmylikeness
Summary: “He thought me dead for ten years. He is adjusting to having family again whom he can be overbearing with.”A story about your brother and his very young death by your hands.(Genji & Hanzo, eventual McCree/Hanzo)





	Afterlife

**Author's Note:**

> Starts within a week of [this short](https://youtu.be/oJ09xdxzIJQ)

 

Genji breathes in.

He still breathes; one of his lungs is a kind of synthetic rubber, not tissue, and cannot heal when damaged - but it also will never puncture if his ribs ever caved in again. So there is that.

His lung was designed, built in a zero-grav lab. The muscles that would pull in air were formed over weeks in incubation. Eighty percent of Genji was once imagined, tested, calculated, cut with precision. Every muscle and every joint fitted together like a spacecraft, like something intended for another planet.

Genji is not strictly human any more, traded his blood for coolant, flesh for metal — he knows this in a distant sort of way, the way you are so sure your dream really happened that split second before you fully wake up. And then that feeling extends for ten years.

Still he breathes like any other natural thing, still needs to. (Right now he can’t, systems failing, red lights going off in his head as he, as calmly as he can, counts down how many more minutes, seconds, the machine around his heart can stand of this.)

Genji figures he’s lived a full life. Lived past his expiration date, certainly. He’d abused his young body while he had it, stuffed it with chemicals until his blood ran wretched, earthen hot, fused blue beneath his skin by something akin to indignant rage. He had fought and lost with his whole body like a flame to wheat.

He never cared for that body. It never belonged to him.

Now in this second form he is faster, impenetrable and impossible to corrupt. This body was a gift. He molted out of his past and saw the world with it. Pushed it to its limits, survived a thousand deaths. You couldn’t really be destroyed if there was nothing inside you but air.

The ambush worked though. He’d been distracted. Being back in Hanamura was bad for him, worse than any amount of drink or drugs.

Everything was smaller, more wooded than he remembers. His old haunts overgrown and deteriorating, the marks he’d left faded and grey in dull accusation. _Look at what you’ve damned._

“You are a fool to come back here, Demon.”

A vacation terribly spent, Genji agrees. Should’ve gone back to Nepal, or followed McCree to Greece and waited out the payload - shouldn’t have mattered that he was not built for beachside.

Instead the remains of the Minami gang, Shimada’s biggest threat since its reign and now stronger than ever since its fall, welcomed him back to his hometown. He recognized a few of Shimada’s old recruits between the group, grizzled and corrupt beyond return, so that it was extra personal.

They’d probably bugged the Shimada palace, picked him off after his infiltration earlier that week, trailed him to the alleyway behind the beat corner shop off main where he’d intended to recoup.

If it was also the same corner he frequented when he was young to beat up the assholes from school and hide from his own bodyguards, then that was probably a bad ninja move. You couldn’t fault nostalgia.

“How fitting that you now appear as one.”

They had first paralyzed his accelerators with anti-omnic charges (Volskaya brand, the good stuff) then cut the back of his knees, slit his throat (or the encasement that passed for it). And now he was wheezing, air not reaching his synthetic lungs quick enough, couldn’t think of a one-liner that would do. Couldn’t see for the fogging of his mind.

“Once a dog of Hanamura, now Overwatch has you doing its bidding,” they laugh, and nothing about it is incorrect, so Genji smiles too behind his bent mask, his cough a wet buzz.

It made sense that it would end here. The end of this body as well as his previous; here in an old, grassy street a stone’s throw from where he was born, quiet and washed blue in the evening light — with fifty assassins who he and his household name had once wronged, their fingers tight on the trigger. Genji with his rusted innards pulled out on to the ground for the whole world to bear witness.

“Now,” the Minami says, teeth a cut of white in the dull streetlight as he aims the barrel down Genji’s mask. “Who is watching you?”

Genji makes a noise of anticipation, the snap of pain that would hit his sensors, but it’s drowned out by thunder. The Minami whips his head straight up to the sky and Genji thinks he’s looking for rain - but the sky remains dry.

Genji blinks and he notices the arrow stuck straight up from between the Minami’s eyes as he crumples to his knees, along with Genji’s stomach. A few others are too slow to escape and they drop like trees as a typhoon of blue light floods the alley. A familiar roar.

God damn it.

Genji is not strictly human any more — so how odd it is that he still has a brother, who is flesh and bone, standing over him like a rook before a king. How strange it is that he limps, that he would place his soft, beating heart between Genji and a thousand bullets, trained and ready for the call.

“Do not move,” Hanzo says, and Genji wants to ask _‘me or them?’_ but his vocaloid is fried and he can only manage a mechanical gurgle.

“Both dragons have come home to die.”

The remaining Minami cock their rifles, and Genji has a hand around Hanzo’s metal ankle, squeezing. He shuts his eyes, thinks — _Let them kill us, you and I, we have fought enough._

Hanzo nocks an arrow and looks down at him, hair in his eyes. Genji probably looks a sight, like a toy smashed on the ground by a child’s tantrum. It is hard to look back up at his brother, and it isn’t about pride.

Genji wants to say so much, now that it’s too late. Wants to say sorry. He wants to say that he was happy to see him again, to speak with him once more in their old dojo. That he was fulfilled he had a chance to show him how strong he’d become.

Genji wants to say that he is proud of him, proud that Hanzo was able to leave this toxic place. That he got out. Genji wants to thank him for bringing him peace. He wished his throat worked, could peel itself together for a last word that would reach his brother’s ears.

“Genji, please,” Hanzo says just as Genji slips into the blackness, and it is easily the worst thing he has heard in a decade.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There was this dream that Genji kept having the first few years after he died.

It was a dream where there was a hole, a cavernous maw between the tallest twin mountains in Hanamura. There lived a beast there, a hellspawn, its eyes blood red and limbs black and crooked as it reached out jealously towards the sky. It wore a horned mask, stained red with the lives of innocents. Wore its own brother’s ribbon around it.

The ground sank and waved with the beast's hunger, and the townspeople disappeared one by one of their own will into its gaping mouth. Genji saw its loneliness tear families apart, leave them maimed and resentful.

Genji climbed in his dream, up and up the mountains, to end the beast’s miserable existence once and for all. To end its hateful reign, like gravity, sinking everyone down into the earths where they all belong- where they shall rot for what they’ve done, to him, to his brother, _fuck them-_

Genji always woke from this dream the moment he saw the mirroring eyes of the Oni. That perpetual grin ripping its visage open from chin to eyes, as his own mouth lifted into a smirk. _**Revenge**_ , it said, tongue flickering. And no, Genji would not become this.

_**You will, just wait.** _

 

 

* * *

 

 

Genji’s first interview with Overwatch, arranged by Angela Ziegler, was held while his lung was still a mechanical pump attached to the wall, beating air into him like a drum.

It had been just three weeks after his own death, a week after the funeral, which he couldn’t attend. Which he wasn’t welcome at.

Barely out of anesthesia, Genji had peered groggily at the man sitting at the end of his bed, backwards on a chair. Beanie pushed down, boots a smear of black on pristine white floors. Genji had known him, from the news.

“What else would you do when you recover? Vacation? Be a bus-bot at some dive?”

Gabriel Reyes had been a sort of distant man. Reserved and sparing with words, but quick to wit when it mattered. He'd reminded him of Hanzo, a bit. His bitter sense of humor had made Genji uneasy, homesick.

They must’ve done the check on him, they must’ve known how this would look to the public - harboring a fugitive, an outlaw, meant to be dead. They must’ve seen the records, the heads on Genji’s ledger, the hundreds of families his name had wronged. Overwatch, in its current state, could not take this kind of blow.

Besides: Genji Shimada, an Overwatch agent? A hero? It was not the occupational title he’d ever wanted. It was a title that was always more fitting for another Shimada.

“It wouldn’t be Overwatch. It’s far too overt for your look,” Reyes had said, gesturing at Genji vaguely. It had been still too vast, too fresh a wound for Genji to respond intelligibly, let alone be offended. Reyes smirked, “And my tastes.”

Blackwatch was meant to be a covert operative working alongside its public one, a special task force developed by Reyes to undergo a bit more of the unseasonable missions, the less PR-friendly, that dealt less with punching evil robots on camera, to put it simply.

“I have seen your work,” Reyes had said, leaning back as if observing an especially abstract painting. “And the world has seen your death. We’re in need of someone of your talents.”

Genji had cleared his throat, ragged, “You need someone who doesn’t exist.”

“Exactly,” Reyes had grinned, liking him.

Genji had hated it at the time, he thinks now. Hated being the hero, doing good. He was young, disfigured and hurt beyond retrieval, not by any kind of science.

He knew he would never make the amends for what was wrought on this world by his existence. His survival would never be justified, nor his false death.

Nonetheless he went on living, fighting, driven by the betrayal of his only loved one in this world, driven reckless and careless of this new body that belonged nowhere; Genji had gone on every mission Blackwatch sent him, hoping he’d never return. It was no secret.

“It’s like you’re suicidal,” McCree had said once, looking down at him, haloed by the blaring light of the ER for what had seemed like the hundredth time.

McCree had been young, too, at the time, had tried to save him, was always the one to drag his beaten, straggling parts back to be repaired. He was a stubborn bastard, and Genji had promised never to love him, trust him.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Genji had said as the machines restarted his heart, knitted his limbs back together like nothing.

The problem was he couldn’t die, couldn’t wither away like his mind - the engine kept pumping because the programming told it to, and Genji’s will had nothing to do with it. Genji hated Ziegler for a time, he thinks now. He thinks a lot about that now.

He’s had the time - when Overwatch and in consequence Blackwatch was disbanded, there had been a civil war. Reyes didn’t live through it - a trait he shared with Genji, though Ziegler didn’t bother to save him.

His death got to Genji like he thought nothing else ever would. It was his own doing, Reyes was never known to do anything the easy way. Could never take the world at anything but face value.

“It’s poison to itself,” Reyes would snarl, almost by rote near the end, about omnic and humankind alike. He’d spit viciously and hopelessly an inch from Morrison’s blue, blue, eyes, which shined contrarily with unwavering righteousness. “You can’t save them, Jack. That’s not up to you.”

“It’s not up to you either,” Morrison had said, evenly. “It’s up to them.”

It turned out that the people didn’t want to be saved, and Overwatch was shut down as a mass threat to global security and privacy. One too many bad calls made by its leadership, too many casualties, too much collateral damage. The Omnic war raged on until enough lives were lost to count as a denouement, and Overwatch fell away from relevance as its three leaders disappeared one by one into its carnage.

As one of the final remaining members, Ziegler had discharged Genji. Built him an armor, a mask, and in return made him promise to live and remember. Life as they both knew it was dissipating as they spoke, that last time, before Genji flew out to Nepal as per her prescription.

“Surviving might not feel worth it,” Ziegler had said, and that had been the first and last time Genji ever saw her shed tears. Of all things, it would be in mourning for Genji’s life. “But know that in war, most aren’t even given that grace.”

“Should I feel grateful,” Genji had asked, empty truly, of identity. Of purpose. He had been less than a ghost.

Ziegler had laughed at him then, shaking her head as her eyes looked past him, at an uncertain future. “You should at least feel lucky.”

Genji did. Genji did now. Overwatch had been a lucky group of people. There was nothing luckier than finding family in a world that doesn’t want you.

 

* * *

 

Genji’s second ever interview with Overwatch, arranged again by Angela Ziegler, was misguided to say the least.

 _Will you help us? -Z_ , read the short message that hailed him from his haven in Yangshuo, nearly ten years after his first recruitment. He’d sat for an hour in his hostel, flicking the comm pad on and off, willing it to disappear.

Genji knew Ziegler very well, and knew the message was rhetorical. The one thing Ziegler knew by heart was the very simple creature that was Genji, whether ten years or a hundred had passed.

 _Yes_ , he sent back.

He was flown in, was sat in a clean, blue room, windowless, in a hidden base on a Spanish coast. Jack Morrison was hunched over on the other side of a terminal that looked recently totaled, a hole blown open against its side. Only his eyes shined lightning blue above a leather mask, worn for a very different purpose than Genji’s.

“What have you been up to,” Morrison had asked, gruffer and less interested than he’s ever been.

“Retired.” It was true, if only by half - Genji hadn’t technically assassinated anyone in nearly a decade.

Genji had traveled, learned, acclimated to a world very much detached from the war he’d lived with for so much of his early life. Genji got older, read a lot, found a teacher who taught him patience and restraint, taught him how to quiet the monster with burning eyes and the ripped-up smile.

Genji rehabilitated, stopped waking up in the middle of the night frightened by the stranger in his bed, his metal limbs locked up with phantom pain. Not as often anyway.

“You’re going to need to tell me everything that could potentially become a liability for Overwatch.”

Reyes had never asked this question that first time. Then again, a Blackwatch agent couldn’t really be liable for much more than what his job description entailed. Overwatch wouldn’t grant him such liberties. Genji would be working under a spotlight, here.

Overwatch was a strange creature these days, unknowable but unforgotten. Unhappy was the land that needed heroes; but the land feared its heroes more than unhappiness, which was, to its people, a rare comfort in a time of uncertainty.

Genji thought to come back because he owed Ziegler. He owed Ziegler and he owed a little to himself, a man who still lived and breathed, part Omnic, part human. He owed it to Zenyatta and the late Mondatta to do right by this second life, to bring a little peace between two worlds.

Jack Morrison, the soldier, the beacon of hope and good, or as he remembered from his adolescence - was not the man that sat across him then. Something was changed, fundamentally, and it was safe to assume - something would be equally changed in the new force of global security that still called itself, now presumptuously, Overwatch.

“I don’t think that’s an appropriate request of a dead man,” Genji had said. “You’re well aware.”

Morrison was, being one himself. Which was why he shook his head once, looked up at him from under greying brows, “We all have pasts, unfinished business.”

Genji never felt he belonged anywhere. Never in his own flesh, never with a race, human or Omnic. There was a certain freedom that came with flying no banners, but Genji knew there was one he could never be free from; as everyone is born somewhere, under a circumstance.

“You can’t fool blood.”

That made Genji flinch, sadness flaring inside. His innards hurt under the iron armor and he was suddenly reminded harshly of his late grandmother, the warm sugar tea she had always brewed him when he couldn’t sleep. No: blood tended to make a fool out of you.

“I had a brother,” Genji started, as if Hanzo was the one who died. “I was raised within a criminal empire run by a remorseless tyrant, and so was he.”

“What happened to him?”

Genji pictured the act, the moment it happened. Tried to place the event and the weapon used to do what the world did to Hanzo Shimada, and he could not. It had been inevitable from the start. It was the curse of being the firstborn, the curse of being the elder brother to Genji, a hellbent creature born and killed by misplaced love. _Genji_ happened to Hanzo.

“He could not escape.”

 

* * *

 

Genji blinks awake like a slap, fists up - breathes in deep like he’s coming up for air.

A light begins to blink in the corner of his eyes and his hand reaches unconsciously for the mask that’s not there. Touches instead his lips, the scarred skin under his eye.

There is a steady beep coming from the monitor, tubes disappearing under his armor. His legs have been reattached, chest cavity realigned, and he’s breathing again - thank god.

He takes count of his surroundings: grey walls, muted tinny sounds and too-fast clouds out the plate-sized windows; Clean chemical smell of a hospital room, stifling and familiar — the medical bay, on the cruiser. Beside his bed the Stormbow is leaned up and Genji stares at it for a good second like an idiot, wondering what universe this is.

“Hanzo,” Genji says like a lie, sandpaper rough. He tries to calm his whirring heart, tries to remember what happened. Surely they did not survive it.

The door slides open then and it’s Ziegler. Genji screams with his eyes.

“I told you to go to Greece with McCree,” she says, leaning against the jamb, terrifying. “Get some sun.”

“How did I get here,” Genji croaks, tries to sit up — his shoulders make a straining noise, a loose gear, like it’s not done fucking rebooting. “Where is-“

“Your body is recalibrating still,” Ziegler warns, a tick in her brow the only sign of worry - the rest of her face writing his murderous ends. “Hanzo Shimada is in the recuperation chambers with a dislocated shoulder and shattered elbow. Lacerations and bullet wounds have been healing. His sleeping patterns are normal.”

Genji’s mind stops running like it’s on fire for a second to compute that. All of those sentences were present tense and that is enough, that’s enough.

“If he hadn’t found your recall comms we wouldn’t have known you’d gone to _Japan_ ,” Ziegler says, raises her eyebrow at the last word like a disappointed mother. Genji had never known one, but if this is what it felt like, he’d opt out.

“Visiting family,” Genji says, tries to smirk but it comes out a wince, feels his lip tear again. Ziegler glides over and he watches her movements like a cornered prey. “You know how it is.”

Ziegler flicks off the beeping screen and shines a blue light in his face, pulls an eyelid down. “About that: The cause of your injuries-“

Genji shakes his head, because no. “Some old blood with the rival house, unsettled. Got ambushed in my old neighborhood.”

Ziegler stops in her ministrations, stares at him, unimpressed.

“I was, distracted. Sentiment,” Genji waves half-heartedly, because the whole thing was ridiculous. He shouldn’t have gone back there. “I am sorry, doctor. It won’t happen again.”

Ziegler sighs, long-suffering. She lets it go and Genji is grateful, as always, for everything.

Genji waits a solid five seconds, then, “How was he, was he-” _difficult? aggressive?_ and his cracked voice is embarrassing, wrought with grief already. How obvious of him, how childish that the first thing he does when he sees his brother after ten years is hospitalize him. As if he’s fulfilling some kind of vendetta.

“I have healed him because he is your family,” Ziegler says, not missing a beat, as she observes the repairs she’s made. Pushes a soft hand against a weak seam at Genji’s side to test the fittings. “However, if he poses a threat to you or Overwatch, I cannot do more.”

Genji doesn’t mention the Hippocratic oath, in reasonable fear for his life, which Ziegler could very easily and happily endanger. “He does not,” Genji shakes his head, grunting in discomfort. Tries to sit up but fails again, Ziegler pushing him back easily.

She looks at him, unblinking. “He has a history. A record of renegade behavior-”

“You don’t know him,” Genji says, too loud, and they’re both taken aback by the candid tone. God, what an idiot, sticking up for his brother like he’s in middle school again and Hanzo had just beaten his bullies to a pulp. “I don’t- He didn’t mean-“

“To _kill you?”_ She looks incredulous, brittle with the injustice.

And well, Genji couldn’t rightfully blame Ziegler, the very person who revived him from the brink of death a million years ago, when they’d both been just over twenty. Found him misshapen and abused with barely a heartbeat, leaking, pouring over the edges.

Ziegler was the one who helped rebuild him, from the wreckage his brother left. Genji Shimada had probably never cried so much in his life, let alone in front of somebody.

The pain of surviving his death had been unbearable, but it was nothing compared to the condemnation. The idea that he was unwanted, considered dispensable by the only person who had meant his whole world. The only reason to go on living.

“No,” Genji says, because he didn’t mean it. Hanzo did not mean to kill him, didn’t think him dispensable, in his opinion. And it may have been why Genji went back to visit his own funeral shrine, the most depressing destination on this planet, on the anniversary of his own murder. During the only time off he’d had in a year.

He’d gone to Hanamura so that he’d get a glimpse of the life his brother was living now. And perhaps a sign that the thing that transpired between them, the duel that wrote legends and inspired myths, was a fucking- sibling misunderstanding. An argument gone too far.

Which of course, it couldn’t have been. The world didn’t work that way, and Genji wasn’t so naive anymore.

Fights like that left a mark. It divided the ground leaving scars that were leagues deep, separated people on a fundamental level. Wars were born that way. Countless people, omnics have died for something so simple and regular as an argument, just words - and now that Genji is older he knows it can’t be taken back so simply with a throwback spar in their old dojo.

“What are you planning to do?”

“I’m going to ask him to stay. Here,” Genji decides. “He is not in his right mind, and that is my doing. I’m haunting him in this-“ He gestures at his useless form. “This body, and it has done something terrible to him.”

“What you are is not your fault,” Ziegler says, her voice breaking. “And if he thinks that, then-“

“I will change his mind.” Genji must. “I am afraid of what he might do.”

Ziegler looks pitying which isn’t a good look on her, sharp brows curled down, frown a crooked line across her soft cheeks. “You cannot force him to stay. He won’t let you.”

Genji peers up at her, exhausted. Ziegler is good, harshly so. Genji is in awe and fear at her unbreaking will to be fair, and just, above everything. If that got in the way of her unnaturally potent sense of empathy for all living things, she could repress it. Genji both respected that, and thought it ridiculous.

She shrugs, defeated, “But, his injury still needs to heal, and I will recommend that he stays grounded for the week.”

“Thank you,” Genji sighs.

**

Genji spends his rebooting hours toiling, cringing at the ceiling. He searches it, grasping for that sense of peace he’d relied upon the past decade, the clear piece of sky that freed him from all of his self-retributions - and finds nothing.

The rest of the Minami gang knew that he lived, that Hanzo lived, and that meant trouble. They would not rest until they saw the end of their lineage.

Genji’s intentions were not to awaken old, sour blood still churning in the crumbling remains of his home town. Damn his intentions.

The corners of the hospital room waves in and out as if threatening to swallow him whole. What he wouldn’t give to leave this bed.

The door opens for the first time in hours and Genji sits up, tries to look as healthy as possible for his doctor. Tries not to look too eager to get out of here, not to look like he’d rather expire than spend another minute not knowing. Unsure and afraid that he imagined the whole thing.

It’s Hanzo, in a wheelchair. Genji nearly throws up at the sight.

“Hanzo,” Genji says, and damn this body, pristinely new and still unable to launch itself towards the man (whether to maim or embrace who could know) like his brain wills.

Hanzo looks okay, if bristly and a little in pain. His eyes are pink along the edges, tired but sharp. The cords along his forearms surge with the effort of pulling himself towards Genji and that’s - Genji doesn’t deserve that.

“What is, brother,” Genji stumbles, reaching out, “Your legs—”

“Please don’t,” Hanzo says, slowing to a stop, and Genji flinches. Didn’t mean to call him that, like he’s twelve again.

Hanzo shuts his eyes, and there it was: That self-damning slant to his mouth and oh, if only Genji could get up, he would beat it off of his face. “My legs only need repair. Like you.”

They just look at each other for a moment, and Genji fears that his brother can hear his heart reverberate off of the hollow of his shell. The metal encasement around what Hanzo used to know, the thing that died by his hands. Genji realizes he is self-conscious in what feels like decades. Genji wishes he could stand up, wishes he had his swords.

Hanzo is staring at him like he’s on death row, small and crooked and nothing like what Genji knew. Genji finds the look unfair.

“You have questions,” Genji says.

“Why didn’t you tell me,” Hanzo says, steadily, like he’s been drowning in it.

“What would that have done to you?”

Hanzo looks incredulous, like Genji is being an idiot - an old look. “And what about now? Why, after all of these years?”

Genji blinks, hears Soldier’s voice like an echo against the hull. _You can’t fool blood._

“I have joined Overwatch,” Genji says, grimaces. He is done with hiding. “You would’ve found out in the news.”

Genji’s body has changed, but his methods have not. The dragon still lives inside his blade, and soon the whole world will know that a Shimada still lived. Genji would be a target so long as he is a Shimada, and so would his brother.

Hanzo closes his mouth in a line, brimming. Dark eyes travel gingerly down Genji’s prone, machine body. Genji could almost feel it. “What has happened to you?”

Genji frowns, reconsiders. Instead grins through his marred lips. “I survived.” It took ten years to come to terms with it, and it was freeing to admit it now, in front of his brother.

Hanzo flinches hard, at that. Eyes dropping off Genji’s face like marbles on glass, fists white around the wheels. Genji keeps doing damage to him, but he doesn’t mean to, he hopes Hanzo knows.

“You should’ve killed me,” Hanzo says, and Genji bottoms out in turn, blinks as if he’s been gut-punched. “Should’ve killed me there, in that dojo.”

Genji shuts his eyes, sees a pair of red open in turn in his mind. He shakes his head, reeling, “You followed me.”

Hanzo followed him. Hanzo saw what he became and he still followed him to the little alcove beside the arcade and that must mean something. That must be enough to dispel this thing that haunts him, please. “Why?

“I am not sure,” Hanzo says, biting his lip. It is the oddest thing - Genji thought Hanzo would think him a phantom, a trick of the mind.

Genji only showed up in Hanamura because he wanted Hanzo to be at peace. He merely wanted him to stop going home every year, to that awful place, anchored still by the weight of guilt.

“It feels as if I’ve been chasing nothing,” Hanzo says, voice a tremor. He looks lost, twenty again, staring imploringly up at his violent, untamed brother, so like those many years ago. Like a damned man at the mercy of the reaper. _What would you have me do, Genji_

“Following you was the clearest path I’ve seen in a while.”

 

 


End file.
